What happened to Minimak?

Minimak went through a minor revision, and then was given some
time for dissemination. During that time, I worked on a more full
layout remapping for my personal use.

Surprisingly, the result of that experimentation was not a better
remapping of the entire keyboard. Instead, I just got a better
understanding of what really makes a difference and what doesn’t.

As a result, I determined that QWERTY really isn’t all that bad, it
just gets one or two things very wrong. I found that you don’t actually
have to remap your entire keyboard to get the best advantages of the
popular layout alternatives today. You just have to fix some of the
more egregious issues with QWERTY with some judicious tweaking.

The result is a new Minimak, more intelligently laid out and with far
fewer key changes. While that means it’s less to learn than most other
layouts, I’ve only found the learning curve to be on par with that of
the original layout despite its fewer keys. That’s because it doesn’t
follow the original’s finger-impulse retention scheme. Maintaining
QWERTY skills along with regular QWERTY skills should be on par and easy
enough as well.

Of course, it bears little resemblance to the former Minimak design, so
much of what was discussed on the site before is in the process of being
updated. I apologize to anyone who is disappointed with the new
materials, as they are replacing the old ones. The old ones are no
longer available as they are clearly superseded by the new design.
Thanks for your understanding and I hope you are interested enough to
give the new design a try.

If you are a Linux user interesed in the original Minimak layout,
Leonardo Cecchi has forked the original repository
and created an xmodmap layout with directions for usage.

Additionally, these files are provided AS IS. We are not
responsible for any damage or inconvenience incurred by their
use.

Minimak consists of all of the files in the github repository, with the exception of the PKL files by FARKAS Máté, which are distributed under GPL 3, and the Mac bindings by David Baker, which are distributed under the MIT license.